Educational Leadership Development

Understanding Leadership: Challenges and reflections

By John West-Burnham and Libby Nicholas

Are current leadership roles and relationships appropriate in a rapidly changing world? Do we need to rethink key assumptions about leaders and leadership? Are you confident about the appropriateness and effectiveness of your chosen leadership styles and behaviours? These are questions facing leaders today and Understanding Leadership can help find the answers, with an approach that is neither normative nor prescriptive but rather exploratory and developmental. Applying research and case studies from inside and outside the educational canon, John West-Burnham and Libby Nicholas challenge prevailing orthodoxies and invite readers to reflect on their personal understanding as the basis for translating theory into practice. All leadership behaviour is based on a number of fundamental personal assumptions about the nature of human relationships and the basis on which human organisations function. Understanding Leadership helps leaders make their implicit understanding explicit and so informs and aids development of professional practice. Effective leaders (and effective people) develop and grow by understanding their personal mindscape the mental map with which they make sense of the world and developing it through reflecting, exploring, testing and questioning.